Software Engineering Technical Leader

Cisco

Confirmed live yesterday High trust

Closes tomorrow Hybrid

Quick summary

Work type: Hybrid
Location: San Jose, CA
Salary: $214,100–$309,800 / yr
Employment: Full-time
Posted: 3 days ago
Freshness: Confirmed live yesterday
Closes: Oct 16, 2026 (soon)
Nearby: 99+ roles within 25 mi

Market check

Salary context

Above market

How this pay compares to similar roles

Similar $204k

This role $262k

$123k $330k

below market most similar roles pay here above market

This role pays more than 92% of similar roles. Most pay $182,000–$226,350 — the blue band above. At the midpoint, this role pays about $262k versus about $204k for comparable roles.

Based on 240 similar postings.

Employer

About Cisco

Cisco Systems is the world''s leading networking technology company, designing and manufacturing networking hardware, telecommunications equipment, and cybersecurity solutions for businesses and governments. Industry: Networking Technology & Cybersecurity

Cisco currently has 271 open roles on FindRole.

Listed pay typically runs $167,700–$245,200 across 195 roles with salary data.

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At a glance

TL;DR · Software Engineering Technical Leader

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The Software Engineering Technical Leader joins the Site Reliability Engineering – Security team to secure production infrastructure and internal platforms. You will set the technical direction for building secure-by-default systems, driving Zero Trust adoption, and embedding security signals into SRE observability. Your daily work involves hardening Kubernetes control planes, GitOps systems, CI/CD pipelines, and observability stacks while managing secrets, PKI, and IAM governance. You will use Python, Go, Terraform, and OPA to automate compliance through policy-as-code. The role addresses the challenge of securing high-value internal tooling and AI/ML workloads, specifically for the Cisco IQ platform. You must possess deep expertise in workload identity, micro-segmentation, and runtime detection tools like Falco or eBPF to reduce the attack surface while maintaining engineering velocity.

Skills

Kubernetes Python Go Terraform GitOps CI/CD AWS Azure GCP Prometheus Grafana OpenTelemetry ArgoCD Flux OPA Kyverno Checkov tfsec Falco eBPF SIEM CSPM CNAPP IAM PKI KMS Zero Trust MLOps SAST SCA SBOM

What you'll do

Design and build secure, scalable infrastructure and developer platforms with security controls embedded by default.
Harden Kubernetes control planes, GitOps systems, CI/CD pipelines, and observability stacks.
Drive Zero Trust adoption through workload identity, continuous verification, and micro-segmentation.
Manage the security posture of secrets management, PKI, and IAM governance.
Automate security and compliance using policy-as-code and automated evidence collection.
Lead cross-team incident response and conduct blameless post-mortems to implement permanent fixes.
Embed security signals into SRE observability and incident response systems.
Advise engineering leadership on trade-offs between security, velocity, and reliability.

What we're looking for

Must have a Bachelor's degree plus 12 years of experience, a Master's degree plus 8 years, or a PhD plus 5 years of related experience.
Must have 5+ years of hands-on production experience scaling a major cloud (AWS, Azure, or GCP) with ownership of cloud security posture.
Must have 3+ years of experience building production automation and tooling in Python and/or Go for security use cases.
Must have 5+ years of experience applying SRE practices, including defining SLIs/SLOs, managing error budgets, and leading incident response.
Must have 5+ years of experience applying security fundamentals such as threat modeling, least-privilege, and vulnerability management at scale.
Must be local to San Jose for this hybrid role.
Hands-on production Kubernetes security (preferred).
Security certifications such as CISSP, CCSP, or AWS Certified Security – Specialty (preferred).

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